You had me at cherry sours...

For some reason, this summer I was pretty good about not snacking on candy. In general, I have really good eating habits but I leave room for indulging in junk snacks periodically. I keep a variety of snacks in my studio that cover both sides of the spectrum: the no salt peanuts, roasted no salt almonds, pumpkin seeds and fruit (I’ve been eating a ton of cut watermelon from the nearby Acme Market this summer, which is probably responsible for me not eating any candy in months) and on the other side is candy, potato chips, pretzels and other not-good-in-large-doses snacks. Although, I can go through a bags of chips in no time. I like keeping both types of snacks around because, why not? I like them all, and don’t usually go overboard with the unhealthy snacks.

I don’t only have snack foods in the studio, I also bring actual food with me for lunch/dinner. I try to make most of my stuff at home to avoid spending a lot of money buying prepackaged meals, like prepared tuna wraps and so on. Having access to food during the day not only helps in keeping my energy levels up but it helps with random anxiousness that appears out of nowhere when I’m working on new paintings. If someone were watching me work some days, they’d see me making a few marks, stepping away to look and go right over to grab a handful of nuts, a fistful or two of chips or take a bite of whatever food I had around. Then, it’s back to work staring at what I did and deciding whether to scrap the whole thing or not.

Back to the candy. I went over to the Sprouts Market near where I live to buy a few things that I needed, mostly stuff I wanted for studio eating. I passed through the bulk section and was happy to see that they’d gotten some cherry sours back in stock. I was successful in not yelling, “Yes!” at the top of my lungs and fist bumping the air. I like the veneer of sanity when in public when it can be helped. Cherry sour balls are one of my favorite sweet snacks and it’s incredibly hard to resist them. I have a good amount of discipline these days and can let sweets just sit around without me devouring it all. There are two times a year when I’ll indulge in sugary snacks more than usual: around Easter and Halloween. Even then, it’s only a couple of fistfuls of jelly beans and a few pieces of candy corn. I can’t handle much candy corn, way too sweet in a weird way. My new batch of cherry sours have lasted a few days now and I’ve only had a couple at a time. Much better than before.

TM